[9585] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Hans-Werner/Conditions Remark
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hans-Werner Braun)
Wed Jan 12 19:55:01 1994
From: hwb@upeksa.sdsc.edu (Hans-Werner Braun)
To: nettech@crl.com (Joseph W. Stroup)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 16:54:24 PST
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199401130025.AA05745@crl2.crl.com>; from "Joseph W. Stroup" at Jan 12, 94 4:25 pm
>>From your remark am I to draw the conclusion that unless someone complains
>or is effected by a backbone, that is built less than spec., its not a
>problem ?
>
>If the NSf is paying out our tax dollars for T-3 services and switching
>, then I expect to see ANS/Merit return and provide what was paid for.
>Maybe I am wrong, if I am please correct me but, if the network is supposed
>to support T-3 its supposed to do it all the time, not after the demand on
>the network has been made.
>
>Your remark about customers other then RE can't really matter that much.
>ANS does not have that many commercial customers at this time. For a long
>time about the best speeds that they could do was 21.5. This is based on
>info. that ANS is willing to talk about. Remember, IBM will not allow anyone
>to benchmark the RS6000 config's. when set in a backbone environment.
>
>All of this is academic. The award is near announcement and ANS has only
>last month completed the upgrade to T-3. I see this a nothing more than
>convenient timing.
>
>If you claim to have the ability to service customers at T-3 in speed and
>through put, then I would expect to see it. Otherwise it seems to me that
>someone is not being truthful. I know that ANS told me they had pricing and
>would love to sell a T-3 connection, a connection that would be functional
>in every way. That was in Jan of 1993. If they could make such claims one
>year ago, then why the December delivery ? I don't expect you to have the
>answer to that question but, it would be interesting to hear it.
Look, I tried to be very careful about the context I positioned my
comments in (politics aside, and such). I was solely focusing on the
quote Gordon posted, which was solely concerned with how the NSFNET
performance could be ensured by non-NSFNET-related customers injecting
traffic into the network. All it said, pretty much, was "ANS, if your
guys' customers interfere with the NSFNET performance, you have to
upgrade the network by the amount of the impact of your clients." From
what I have seen, ANS actually *has* upgraded the network beyond the
scope of the initial T3 agreement.
In this specific context any technology definciencies, tax dollars, 0.5
T3, etc., are relatively irrelevant. In a different context they may be
very relevant, of course, but that's not what the quote was about.
In other words, I was concerned about metrics for service qualities,
and accountability of resource consumptions. Until we have a model for
that, it is a bit hard to say whether ANS is below, above, or at the
level of the initial agreement that Gordon was quoting. If you believe
the technology is deficient, than that's a separable problem, and had
nothing to do with whether ANS has to upgrade bandwidth due to
non-NSFNET clients.
Hans-Werner
